Wednesday, 9 August 2017

The Telegraph crumbles

We’ve long been aware that the Telegraph no longer merits its affectionate nickname 'Torygraph' since it turned sharp left. These days it’s virtually a Guardigraph.

Senior Telegraph reporter Andrew Gilligan has cross-posted one of his own blog articles on Harry’s Place, complete with all the details, proper reporter style.

It’s a sad and worrying tale about the Telegraph’s weak response to aggressive ‘anti-Prevent’ activists, i.e., Islamists who oppose the government’s Prevent strategy.

The BBC is also involved. It aired a story about “Muslims being picked on” and falsely presented an activist in the ‘anti-Prevent Strategy’ group as an ‘ordinary’ parent.

The Telegraph has adopted a gutless policy of total capitulation to vexatious games played by aggressive anti-government Islamists and has paid out considerable sums in settlement rather than fight. The total surrender of the Torygraph.

7 comments:

I used to get the Telegraph on subscription but gave up on it about 10 years ago. I found I was only reading the Op-Ed, the Letters Page and the Obits (as good a source of good grammar and brevity as one could hope to find). I think it was when they let (then yet to be) jailbird Denis McShane fill a page with his dirge that I finally had enough of them and the rest of the MSM. These days I get most of my news from my Twitter feed (they're not all raving lefties on there.......yet).

That's such a shame (not that I'm a Tory but...). I had thought that it had been quite some time now since the Telegraph had become anything more than a joke masquerading as a serious paper (much like the remainder of the broadsheets). Peter Oborne first wrote of this back in 2015, Private Eye have been writing about it even longer than that. I have said before that in the digital age, there is an all-encompassing decline in journalism and what constitutes journalism. Nobody should be surprised.

I was cold called by The Telegraph last week offering me a reduced cost subscription. When I said that the paper no longer matched my conservative values, the chap told me it was moving back to the right. I suppose I haven't seen Mary Riddell recently but otherwise on the days I go to Waitrose (it's free and we like the sudoku) I haven't noticed the shift. In addition, as I told the caller, I want to buy a newspaper for news (and comment) but that if I wanted fashion and celebrity I would buy Hello. But I did tell him we enjoy reading Charles Moore, from whom we rarely disagree.

Charles Moore is not the only 'real' journalist still at the Telegraph - watch out for Allison Pearson, who has written some splendid denunciations of militant Islam, particularly in the wake of the Paris, Nice, Manchester and London atrocities. For some reason, she is usually hidden away in the features section, instead of appearing under 'Comment' - perhaps the editor wants to claim nobody reads her to justify, one day, replacing her with yet another Grauniad clone. I do agree, though, that the paper is not what it used to be - no wonder our Home Secretary feels free to import bearded 'refugee children' in their 20s and 30s: the Times no longer Thunders and the Telegraph can barely manage a squeak.

And then I read today's Telegraph which contains two sizeable squeaks! The first, the lead story, informs us that, "Asian Muslim sex gangs are 'racially aggravated criminals.'" We learn that the Attorney General is facing calls from a former DPP and a former policing & justice minister to review the sentences because of their racially aggravated nature. If the BBC News has reported this, I have missed it. The second 'squeak' is from Trevor Phillips who inveighs against the BBC for labelling the child abusers of Newcastle as 'Asians,' rather than'muslims.' Phillips says that this insults, 'the largest ethnic minority group in the UK - Hindu Indians,' who have never been remotely associated with these crimes. 'It really comes to something,' says Phillips, 'when the BBC prefers to risk being condemned for racism (rather) than expose itself to the charge of Islamophobia.' Perhaps somebody at the Telegraph has been reading this blog! Again, I'm pretty sure, the BBC has forgotten to report Mr Phillips' words.